A solo exhibition of recent figurative paintings by Hackney-based artist David Caines.

David Caines’s psychologically charged paintings bring together unlikely groups of curious and seemingly unrelated characters in carefully arranged groupings against empty backgrounds. Held to ransom by the canvas, they are forced to perform in a curious tableau vivant. To help them interact in this liminal state, they have an array of banal props such as masks, chairs, sticks and ropes. Sometimes this leads to dramas involving bondage or violence. These meticulously rendered encounters are awkward and ambiguous, and the aim is to evoke feelings of foreboding, melancholy and unease in the viewer. The paintings are littered with red herrings and false clues. It is left to the viewer to conjure the narrative.

“Like snapshots in a photographer’s darkroom the images take root at the back of the mind, slowly developing over time into a residue more disquieting, more resonant than what we originally saw.“
Mary Kate Connolly